I never read a book until the 11th grade. It was The Old Man and the Sea. I felt sorry for the fish. Inauspicious beginning for an English professor. Not for a writer.
The teacher—I still remember his name, Mr. DeSoto—challenged me not only to finish the book but to understand it. I was one of some 35 juniors in Santa Rosa High School’s remedial English class, composed mostly of students like me—truant, disaffected. “OK, tough guy, see if you can read this book and get its meaning,” said Mr. DeSoto.
Feeling sorry for the fish, he said, was not a “legitimate” response. That word, or rather its opposite, would help me understand how I felt then, though I was hardly able to put the pieces together.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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A year before, a friend and I had dropped acid for the first time. As we sat at the kitchen table anticipating the drug’s effects, he asked, “Are you really Mexican?” “That’s what the papers say,” I told him.
He was Mexican, what most folks in those days would have considered “a real Mexican.” I have blue eyes, fair skin—never mind my hair was black. The papers I was referring to were adoption documents; my adopted mother had been told the contents by the doctor who delivered me. Mother: Bunny Hartman, Caucasian. Father: unknown, non-white, additional information suggesting he was likely Mexican.
My earliest memory is of a neighbor girl who asked if I was adopted. I sensed in her tone that adopted meant something was wrong with me. First-grade catechism class: A nun informed me I had two original sins instead of one because my parents weren’t married. “You are illegitimate,” she said. Illegitimate: not authorized by law; not in accordance with accepted standards or rules. I had internalized its meaning, no doubt even before I remembered hearing it, and allowed it to be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Bunny Hartman, 17, died 10 days after she had me, as a result of a mismatched blood transfusion. My father, Emilio Hilario, was not Mexican after all. He was Coast Miwok/Southern Pomo and Filipino. Learning as much in my 20s was comforting, if only to understand my actual heritage. It didn’t settle or mitigate a sense of illegitimacy. It heightened it, gave it shape.
Deeming things and people illegitimate is pervasive, now more than ever. It’s a way of maintaining what is accepted, what is not, who is in, who is out. Nation-states require homogeneity. Their armies and religions require conformity. Indigenous cultures, certainly mine, have a history of valuing heterogeneity. The more different a person is, the more intriguing. Aren’t awe and wonder touchstones of respect? Colonization succeeds when we internalize the colonizer’s values. We become too dark, too light. Too much Indian, not enough Indian. I jokingly say that nobody knew there were California Indians until there were casinos.
I began writing the stories for Grand Avenue in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford. A professor, championing Carveresque minimalism, told me I would never be able to publish my stories. “Who are these people you are writing about, anyway?” he asked me. I was daunted, discouraged. I went back to the stories only after I acquired a tenure-track teaching job at UCLA and knew I had financial security.
It has never been enough for me just to write. Today, I am the chair of my tribe, the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, serving my 17th consecutive term. We have, in a short time, become one of the most prosperous and influential tribes in the nation, supporting education and donating tens of millions of dollars to social justice and environmental stewardship programs.
It is ironic that I grew up among my people, lived in the same houses, hung out with cousins, heard countless stories, yet felt out of place. I was home and not home. Visible and invisible. Not fully home, not fully legitimate. I wrote Grand Avenue not just to make a people visible but, more so, to attempt to understand, give voice to the struggles we make, the battles we fight, to undo the forces that would have it otherwise.
So many years ago, I might have told Mr. DeSoto I felt the fish’s pain if he hadn’t insisted there was only one right answer.•
